# A Modest Proposal: For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick

**Author:** Jonathan Swift
**Tags:** Ireland, Religious satire, English, Political satire, English
**Price:** Free
**Formats:** DOCX, EPUB, FB2, PDF, TXT
**Downloads:** 34
**Added:** 10.07.2026
**URL:** https://samolit.com/books/95800

## Description

A Modest Proposal is Jonathan Swift's most notorious satirical pamphlet, first published in 1729 as a searing response to the desperate poverty gripping Ireland under British rule. Adopting the calm, reasonable voice of a public-spirited economist, Swift's unnamed narrator surveys the beggars and starving families crowding Dublin's streets and offers a chillingly practical solution: that the children of the poor be fattened and sold as food for the tables of the wealthy. Beneath its deadpan arithmetic and polite bureaucratic tone lies a devastating attack on absentee landlords, indifferent politicians, and the callous economic theories that reduced human suffering to mere statistics. By pushing utilitarian logic to its most grotesque extreme, Swift exposes the moral bankruptcy of a society willing to consider any solution to poverty except genuine compassion and justice. Sharp, unsettling, and darkly funny, this short work remains one of the greatest examples of satire in the English language, as relevant to discussions of inequality and political indifference today as it was nearly three centuries ago. A masterclass in irony that still shocks and provokes.